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Reading the Book of Mormon with Grant Hardy Latter-day Saint Perspectives Podcast Episode 101: Reading the Book of Mormon with Grant Hardy This is not a verbatim transcript. Some wording has been modified for clarity, and timestamps are approximate. Stephen O. Smoot: 00:43 Welcome to another episode of the LDS Perspectives Podcast. I am your host for this episode, Stephen Smoot, filling in for Laura Hales, and I am very excited to be sitting down with the one and only Grant Hardy for this episode. We’re grateful to have you here, Grant. Grant Hardy: 00:58 It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Stephen O. Smoot: 01:01 Before we jump into what our discussion is today, which is your new Maxwell Institute Study Edition of the Book of Mormon, I thought it might be good to get to know you a little bit. Grant, could you tell us more about yourself, your academic background, and your personal background that got you interested in studying the Book of Mormon? Grant Hardy: 01:19 Sure. When I went to college, I went to BYU. And my first semester of my first year, I signed up for ancient Greek because why else would you go to college? Stephen O. Smoot: 01:29 Yeah. Why not? Grant Hardy: 01:29 That’s the obvious choice. I was excited about that, and then after my freshman year, I went on a mission. I was assigned to serve in Taiwan and learn Mandarin Chinese. I got interested in that as well, and then came back and continued a bachelor’s degree in ancient Greek. I minored in Chinese, and then went to grad school at Yale in Chinese language and literature. I’ve been a professor since then. I’m teaching Chinese history. Stephen O. Smoot: 01:56 It sounds like you have a remarkable academic background then with various cultures and languages, and as I understand, especially religious texts. You’ve published and done some lectures on world religious texts. Could you tell us a little bit more about the work that you’ve done in that context? Grant Hardy: 02:13.604 Sure. I teach at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and I have a joint appointment in the history department and in the department of religious studies. I teach courses on the history of Buddhism and on world scripture. A few years ago, I did a lecture series on DVD and CD with the Great Courses company called “Sacred Texts of the World” that was 36 lectures looking at scripture from various religious traditions. I was trying to introduce those and help people make sense of new and perhaps foreign traditions. LDS Perspectives Podcast Episode 101: Reading the Book of Mormon with Grant Hardy Stephen O. Smoot: 02:46 We are here today to talk about your Maxwell Institute Study Edition of the Book of Mormon. But before we get into that, I thought it would be good to talk about the history of the Book of Mormon or rather the printing history of the Book of Mormon. When average Latter-day Saints think of the Book of Mormon, they probably imagine the blue missionary copy that’s everywhere that you hand out as a missionary or to your kids or whatever. But there is a long history behind printed editions of the Book of Mormon leading up to what we have here with the Maxwell Institute edition. Just briefly, could you tell us a little bit about the major milestones of the Book of Mormon printing history? Starting from 1830 to subsequent editions. Grant Hardy: 03:31 Sure. The first edition is 1830, of course. People can look at that very easily at the Joseph Smith Papers website. The Book of Mormon was first printed in long paragraphs. The previous manuscript basically has just words. It doesn’t have punctuation. It has chapter divisions, but very little other than that. The non-Mormon typesetter put in all of the commas and the semicolons and the periods. It probably has too many commas by 21st-century standards, but he did a good job. He also put it into paragraphs. But basically, he started a new paragraph every time he came to “and it came to pass,” unless it was in two sentences next to each other. Sometimes you have these short paragraphs, and sometimes paragraphs go on for pages and pages. That’s the way the book was printed in 1830. There’s another edition in 1837 where Joseph Smith made several thousand changes. Mostly minor changes where he’s updating the grammar and systematizing things. He changes “which” to “who” about 1,000 times, and he deletes, I think, 47 instances of, “it came to pass.” And so, he does grammatical fixes. Then in 1840, the last edition that he was personally involved with, he went back and took some readings from the original manuscript that had been lost. He fussed around a little bit with the language. Not a whole lot. The next big edition happens in 1879 when apostle Orson Pratt puts the text for the first time into numbered verses. Joseph Smith had always seen the Book of Mormon in paragraphs. Stephen O. Smoot: 04:58 Are those numbered verses what we have today? Grant Hardy: 05:01 Yes. Stephen O. Smoot: 05:01 Do those Orson Pratt revisions survive today? Grant Hardy: 05:01 He shortened the chapters. There are more chapters than in 1830, and he put in these numbered verses. They are the same verses we use today. Then in 1920, a committee under the leadership of James Talmage did the Standard Edition where it looks like the King James Version of the Bible. You have double columns and individual verses. There are little introductions to each chapter, and then some cross-references at the bottom of the page. The 1981 edition, the one that we’re most familiar with now, the one that’s current, takes that basic model and then adds a lot more footnotes to the topical guide. It tries to bring the four standard works together so they’re correlated, and you can look up topics. That’s pretty much what we use now. There were some adjustments in 2013, but those were just a couple of words. Mostly some punctuation. Hardly anything at all. We basically use the 1981 edition. Page 2 of 17 Episode 101: Reading the Book of Mormon with Grant Hardy Stephen O. Smoot: 05:59 This isn’t the first time that you yourself have done an edition of the Book of Mormon. You have the study edition that just came out with Maxwell Institute, but a couple of years ago, you had what you call your Readers Edition of the Book of Mormon. Grant Hardy: 06:11 It’s a little embarrassing to have so many editions of the Book of Mormon myself. I published the Reader’s Edition about 15 years ago with the University of Illinois Press. There are maybe three stories, all equally true, behind that edition. The first one is that when I majored in ancient Greek, I was reading the New Testament along with other things such as Plato, Aristotle, and Homer. I started to take a look at modern translations of the Bible, which are formatted differently than the standard King James Version. Modern translations of the Bible will usually have superscripted verse numbers, and then they’ll be organized into paragraphs, there’ll be quotation marks, and there will be section headings. I thought I could do this with the Book of Mormon. Not change the words, but just change the formatting, make it easier to read, and easier to understand what’s going on to capture the flow of the story. That’s the first story. Stephen O. Smoot: 07:05 Okay. Grant Hardy: 07:06 The second story begins in an Elders quorum meeting in New Haven, Connecticut. The missionaries wanted to encourage people to share the Book of Mormon. And so, they had a Book of Mormon that they gave to somebody every week and challenged them to give this to someone else. I got that Book of Mormon one week, and, unfortunately, the missionaries had gone through and highlighted some key verses. They then made a scripture chain throughout the book. They did that with the best of intentions, of course, but I looked at that and said, “I can’t give this to any of my friends because I’m going to graduate school with very smart people, and this will insult them. They know how to read books.” I gave away another copy of the Book of Mormon, but then I was stuck with this blue copy. Now, I thought, what am I going to do with this scripture-chained copy? I felt bad about throwing it away. So that’s the Book of Mormon that I took a blue pen to and just started making lines to say, “If I were to divide this into paragraphs, where would they go? Is there a natural break in the subjects?” And when I started, I wasn’t even sure that the Book of Mormon would fall out into paragraphs. I mean, I guess it wouldn’t have to. It’d still be the word of God even if it just was jumbled together. But I found that it went pretty easily into paragraphs, and so that was the start of this. That’s story number two. Grant Hardy: 08:23 Story number three.
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